Some friends approached me with question about where do I buy my domain name and web hosting. While it’s a very straight forward question to answer, it reminds me of one of the biggest mistake that I made when I was still a newbie. That is paying full price for domain and hosting.
I hosted my domain name primarily with GoDaddy. When I was a newbie, I usually ignored the coupon field on the checkout because I don’t have a discount coupon. I also don’t know where to get one. Nowadays, I googled for GoDaddy discount coupon to make sure that I don’t pay full price. Sometimes GoDaddy has special promotion of U$1.99 or U$ .99 per domain name. Most of the times, they do 10%, 20% or $6.99 per domain name.
I used to host my website with GoDaddy too, utilising their discount coupons. Generally, they are very good. The site is up 99.9% at the time and the server is fast. Their customer service is also 24/7 and they have Australian number so I dont have to pay for IDD if I need urgent thing solved. I stick with them for a few years because I have been burnt by a few cheap and small hosting companies before.
However, their Custom hosting control panel irked me to no end. It is not flexible at all. I prefer industry standard hosting control panel like cPanel. I can’t upload and unzip archives on the fly. The last straw is they do not allow me to run Cron Job more than every 30 mins. My newest twitter application requires me to run Cron Job every minute. So obviously their hosting no longer meet my application.
So, I have decided to move my web hosting this month to this company. With 50% off coupon, I only paid for AU$40/year for an unlimited linux hosting. I am not sure if the coupon code will always be valid so I am not publishing it. But, please leave a comment on this entry if you want it.
